Alright, yesterday I went to a concert. I had been looking forward to seeing this group of people for a really long time, since I was in high school. I missed out on a concert a year or so ago when they were "The Books," and I was pretty upset I couldn't go; supposedly, it was they best they ever played. But I did make it out last night, and I had a wonderful time.
Last night I went to Dan's SilverLeaf to see Zammuto. Zammuto is a very talented group of musicians, led by Nick Zammuto, who writes most of their material, sings, and plays some guitar. Nick's brother Mikey plays bass, Gene Back plays guitar and keys, and Sean Dixon is a beast behind the drums.
These guys have a very interesting style. There are plenty of bands that play with backing tracks in today's music world, but it's my opinion that most of these artists play with backing tracks to make playing shows easier, or to sound better because a pre-recorded track will sound better than a live track. Not Zammuto. They have backing tracks that add to the interesting and inventive sounds they're producing live, and the backing track certainly doesn't make shows easier; sometimes the track they're listening to is giving very syncopated rhythms, or could be difficult to follow along with, and all of the musicians are playing their intricate, precise parts along to it. It's a spectacle, especially watching Sean Dixon play his ridiculous polyrhythms and changing meters while effortlessly staying in time.
And they have to stay in time, because usually there are synced videos that go along with the backing tracks and live music. They opened their set with "Groan Man, Don't Cry," set to videos taken from dashboard cameras set on car windshields as they drive down roads. Some of the videos added meaning and clarity to the songs, to me anyways, but others were pretty silly. Their song "YAY," which, from the title, infers something happy, is really a song about chronic back pain, and was set to a synchronized slide show of people and silhouettes of people with chronic back pain. Usually the people on the slides were over-exaggerating for the cameras or kind of bad actors, which added to the comedy. When they played "Zebra Butt," slide after slide of zebra skin and the occasional zebra butt quickly flew by.
They played a couple songs that weren't on the album though, and I think I may have liked them the most. The closed out their set with a song featuring Mikey, the bass player, both musically and visually; his difficult bass lines and musicality were brought to the musical foreground, which was a treat, but at the same time, Zammuto family home videos were playing on the projector, and most of them were of Mikey looking ridiculous or doing ridiculous things. I guess from Mikey's perspective, it would a pretty awkward and weird way to be featured, to have to play difficult solo bass lines over embarrassing home videos of yourself, but the audience thought it was both hilarious and musically impressive.
For their encore they played along to a highly edited and spliced video of a man playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" on the auto-harp. The video was edited to show the old man playing the most impressive auto-harp solo of all time, playing incredibly fast and difficult passages on an instrument that isn't really meant for that kind of thing. It was an amazing thing to watch, but at the same time, watching a digitally edited old man shred on an auto-harp was pretty funny.
I don't know if they actively strive to be funny, necessarily, but I'm sure they want to entertain their audience and hopefully play music that will inspire them, and they definitely do both of those things. I just find them hilarious sometimes.
They also played a couple of old books tunes, including "Smells Like Content," from their album "Lost and Safe." They inspired me to buy that album, on vinyl, for only ten bucks, which is a steal, even though I found out it was a little warped when I took it home.
So if you have a chance, go see Zammuto when they come to wherever you are, if they're coming anywhere close to you. And if not, feel free to check our their music:
http://soundcloud.com/zammuto
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